Howdy!
It’s summer, and I am almost on vacation! Finally. This is the view from the hotel room where I write today’s newsletter. As always, you don’t have to consume today’s edition all at once, you can always come back to it. The next newsletter will arrive in your inbox on August 28th, 2021. The next Gutenberg Changelog episode will be recorded on August 20th, 2021. So, you won’t be entirely deprived of Gutenberg updates. Just make sure you to subscribe to the podcast, if you haven’t already.
Furthermore, the Keeping up with Gutenberg Index can serve as a fall backspace to get your Gutenberg fix.
Let’s keep this short. The lake is waiting ⛱️. No Red Tide insight.
Be well, stay safe!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
📢 New Episode #49 is now available! 🎙️ (with transcript!)
Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz Ziolkowski discuss Gutenberg plugin release 11.2, drag and drop, flex layout, core data shortcuts and modern WordPress development.
Subscribe to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast
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‘Roadmap’ for Gutenberg (preliminary)
In his latest post, Preliminary Road to 5.9 Matias Ventura lists and describes the work before the Gutenberg contributors regarding Block Patterns, Global Styles, Navigation Block and overall Site Editor interface for theme.json configuration and settings. Ventura also identified a few shortcomings of first iterations, especially regarding responsiveness of blocks, block patterns used in different contexts.
Justin Tadlock‘s article Early WordPress 5.9 Look: The Road Toward Deeper Responsive Block Design goes into a lot more details. WordPress 5.9 is scheduled for December 2021 and Feature freeze will be about two months prior.
There are a few overview GitHub issues, you can follow along and add your opinion and ideas for some features mentioned:
- Updated scope for site editing projects (#33094)
- Open issues WordPress Pattern-Directory
- Navigation Block Tracking Issue (#27593)
- Global Styles: Design Tools Overview (#33447)
This might not be all important overview issues. Please notify me if you are missing one!
In his post, Matt Chowing writes on what it takes to build an Editor by sharing code Between Android, iOS, and web with React Native. For all of us emerged in web development it is an interesting read, about the difference between ideas, hopes, and the reality of programming for the mobile devices.
Full Site Editing & Theme development
After a break, Anne McCarthy published is a new FSE Call for testing (#9) for the FSE outreach program: Handling HigherEd Headers. This test takes you along a deep dive into Navigation block and screens, and its goal is to expose the experimental features to a larger community and figure out what it takes to promote it out of the experimental state.
Status of Child Themes for FSE an update by Carolina Nymark for Theme developers.
In Keeping up with block supports, Lister share her approach to discovery and maintaining block via block.json files of core blocks and came up with a spreadsheet on which core block supports which features. It is quite a helpful resource, that could be integrated into the Block editor handbook
Sarah Norris provided this week’s (number 60) round-up post from the Themes team around Gutenberg & Themes. Check it out to learn about the discussion FSE, Themes, and Global Styles. Norris also share a few tracking issues to keep you updates.
The team of Metabox published “Full Site Editing (FSE) – All You Need To Know” for WordPressers, who need to catch up around the FSE discussion.
Dario Jazbec Hrvatin of Toolset team posted Full Site Editing Future Of WordPress And What It Means For You. He shared what he learned talking to authors behind Astra, Page Builder Framework, and Sydney Pro themes!
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
WordPress Development is hard (Part 2)
Last week, I also missed listing the Mainline podcast episode “Contributing and Developing for WordPress Is Not as Easy as It Used to Be“ with Jeff Chandler, John James Jacobi and Chris Wiegman.
Video: “Is Gutenberg Killing WordPress Themes? Challenges for a Theme Developer in a Gutenberg World.” by David Vongries, who shares the hard time a theme developer can have when keeping pace with Gutenberg development.
My advice for people depending on themes for their revenue and who don’t have an army of developers keeping up with the new thing: Keep doing what you are doing until things settle with the next two or three releases.
Does WordPress Have a Gutenberg Problem? Asked David Bushell listing a few problems building blocks cause in creating sites for customers. It’s comes across like the other rant of a developer who is fighting change. However, Bushell touches on recurring themes we hear before and outlines the hurdles for WordPress developer when starting to switch to Gutenberg for their development:
Opinionated styling of core blocks is another pain point for WordPress developers. The mechanism to control this via theme.json has now arrived but of course its not yet completely develop.
Deprecation of static blocks: How can post that have earlier version of particular blocks stored be updated to a new rendering. There isn’t a good answer yet, and many developers mostly develop dynamic blocks, rendered in PHP consistently no matter when the block was added to a post. If a new version is available, it’ll get the new design/styling. Or skip native block development altogether and rely on Blocks created via Advanced Custom Fields Pro.
A dynamic block was my first block, too, and I haven’t had the time to experiment with JavaScript blocks and the versioning for static blocks.
Is WordPress Development Really All That Hard To Get Into Today? Asked Justin Tadlock in his opinion post on the WordPress Tavern, that collected over 40 comments from the site’s Community, many share great resources to get over initial hurdles, too.
